Mumbai: The Shiv Sena (Uddhav Balasaheb Thackeray) Tuesday needled the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) by bringing up Narendra Modi’s retirement, saying if the Prime Minister could ask other senior leaders like L.K. Advani to sit out after 75, then would he himself follow his own rule.
“A rule is a rule and no one is an exception is what Modi used to say. So what will he do now from September when he will turn 75? Will he retire?” the Shiv Sena (UBT)’s mouthpiece Saamana said in its editorial.
On Sunday, Modi visited the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) headquarters in Nagpur and met Sangh chief Mohan Bhagwat amid talks of the BJP leadership signalling a truce with its ideological parent after reports of some friction last year.
Modi will turn 75 this September, and a debate over his future gained momentum after Shiv Sena (UBT)’s Sanjay Raut, who is also the executive editor of Saamana, the mouthpiece of the party, claimed Sunday that Modi went to Nagpur to convey that he was retiring this year.
Maharashtra Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis had to come out Monday to dismiss the speculations, saying that Modi would continue to remain the prime minister and would return as the PM in 2029.
A day later, the party again asked the question of Modi’s retirement in its mouthpiece Saamana to take on its former ally, the BJP.
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‘Will PM Modi retire?’
In Saamana, the party talks about how the duo of Modi and Amit Shah established themselves when Nitin Gadkari was the BJP chief. But then later through “a conspiracy”, Gadkari was removed. If Gadkari had become the chief once again, Modi would not have gotten so much space in politics, the party said.
“Gadkari was a RSS man directly appointed by the RSS. But he was removed like a thorn. And this is still hurting the RSS, and so this time, the BJP chief will be decided from Nagpur itself,” the editorial reads.
Gadkari had served as the BJP national president of his party from 2009 to 2013. Senior leader Rajnath Singh had succeeded him as the party chief.
The Shiv Sena (UBT) wondered whether Modi would retire in September given that the PM has said that 75 is the age of retirement. So whether to work as a Sangh worker or should he work on some project appointed by the Sangh, he had to discuss this with the Sangh chief, the party added.
In a related development, Maharashtra BJP president Chandrashekhar Bawankule asserted that it was the country who would decide Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s tenure. He dismissed Raut’s statement as a “political stunt”.
“There is no rule or any decision that the respected Prime Minister Narendra Modi ji should leave politics after the age of 75. It is not stated in any official policy of BJP either,” he wrote in a long post Tuesday in Marathi in ‘X’. The Constitution does not specify an age limit for the prime minister, he added.
Bawankule further went on to cite the examples of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, Manmohan Singh and Moraji Desai to dismiss talks about Modi taking the backseat.
In fact, talks about Modi’s ‘retirement’ had first gained traction last year when Aam Aadmi Party chief Arvind Kejriwal had taken a dig at the BJP asking whether Prime Minister Narendra Modi would be retiring in 2025. At that time, Union Home Minister Amit Shah had asserted that Modi would become the prime minister and complete his third term.
(Edited by Tony Rai)
